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March 27, 2017

One of the central questions on the sacrifice of Jesus is the question of what his sacrifice actually means. The problem in interpreting that question is that we often think from a Roman background. In Latin, you have the word offere, which means ‘to offer’ and ‘to present.’ The concept of sacrifice carries the idea that something must be offered and presented. This leaves us with the question of whether the sacrifice of Jesus is offered to God or presented to humanity.

In many religions, the dominant thought is that the gods want what you have! They come with their needs and their desires and ask, What do you have to offer? The Romans had a saying, Do ut des, which means ‘I give so that you give’ or ‘I give in order that you will give.’ They gave some of what they had to those gods, expecting that they then will give them favor in return. Even today, this idea runs very deep in our minds: you must first give something to get something. “Give a little, take a little” … Right?

The Latin word placare means ‘reconcile’ or ‘to atone.’ In its literal sense, it means: ‘smoothening’ or ‘flattening.’ The Roman perspective understood it to be our job as humans to ‘smoothen’ or ‘flatten’ the face of the gods. Frowning eyebrows and significant wrinkles need to be ironed away. But those gods were insatiable; they were never satisfied and never had enough.

This Roman concept of offering sacrifices to keep the gods satisfied can easily slip into our image of God. We can develop the idea that, in a world where we need to satisfy so many human (or man-made) needs, desires or demands, even God our Father must be satisfied. Is God like that? Is that what Jesus’ sacrifice meant? Is the good news that Jesus offered himself to satisfy God?

When we look at the Hebrew word for sacrifice, we find ourselves in a completely different world. The Hebrew word for offer is korban. That word is related to the verb karaf, which can be translated as ‘to approach’ or ‘to draw near.’ This Hebrew word for sacrifice immediately offers a very different meaning to the matter. With God, it’s not so much about us meeting his need; it’s not about what we need to offer or sacrifice to God. Rather, the question on God’s heart seems to be, How shall I get rapprochement (reconciliation)?

In the Bible, we read that the approach always comes from God’s end. God is the subject. He does it; he offers it. In Psalm 50, God says, I'm really not waiting for a couple of bulls or goats’ blood. Rather, the whole temple service offerings were to humans. It was a meant as a representation, showing humankind that God is so merciful. God was showing us that he will always go the way of mercy and will always lead us on that road. So, all the ceremonies surrounding the tabernacle and temple were to mankind; to show humanity what God is like. The tabernacle represented God's patience and the worship around the temple was a portrayal of God's mercy.

Ultimately, we confess that God is revealed in Jesus. Therefore, Jesus becomes everything: he is the tabernacle, he is a priest, he is the temple and he is the sacrificial lamb. He becomes the portrayal of God’s patience and mercy. God’s presents a sacrifice to mankind: the life of Jesus, his birth, his death and his resurrection. God creates the rapprochement to us. That reconciliation was from God, the One who serves us with a sacrifice, showing us that there is nothing on his end to hold him back from getting close and reconciling with us. Jesus’s sacrifice was meant to create something in us. Jesus poured himself out, gave himself away—he died in order to cultivate something alive in us.

In the life of Jesus, we see a God who is radically different than the Roman gods. Instead of working our way up the ladder in order to get closer to the transcendent, God comes down in Jesus and offers himself to us. Amen.

March 26, 2017

There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men - Maurice Herzog, Annapurna

Mountains and hills, snow robed peaks and knife edged turrets have a way of drawing the spirit and soul to the heights. There are rock jocks, of course, that merely turn to the high regions to bag yet another peak, to overcome another challenge. But, there is, at a deeper level, much more to the mountains than merely another ascent feather to place in a climbing cap.

Many of us grew up, as children, with the stirring tales, set in Switzerland, of Heidi and Banner in the Sky. These novels were made into movies, and both tales are more than merely about living in the Swiss Alps or climbing the Matterhorn. It is impossible to read Heidi or Banner in the Sky without being taken by the fact that these stories are about, at a deeper level, inner mountains that need to be climbed to overcome a variety of fears, insecurities, anger and bitterness. Such interior peaks take people to vistas and views that open up all sorts of new possibilities for the journey of life. But, a journey needs to be made to reach such pinnacles, and often many a hard hike.

It is significant to note that the Greek word for mountain, oros, is the root from which we get oracle and oracular. Moses went to the peaks to receive the Decalogue, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was, indeed, taught high above the hurly burly of valley life. There is something about the mountains that points the way to deeper and higher issues. Those who take the time to travel to such high places, spend hours, days or weeks in the solitude and silence of such ancient sentinels often return different people.

The mystical tradition within Christianity often refers to our pilgrimage as an ascent to insight or a climbing of a ladder from lower to higher desires. It is significant to note that Dante in the Divine Comedy used the analogy of the mountains as a means of charting the journey from darkness to light just as Petrarch’s, ‘The Ascent of Mount Ventoux’, was as much about an inner hike as it was about a demanding physical climb of Ventoux in France. There is no doubting the fact that mountains, hills and highlands are one of the basic archetypes and mythic ways of seeing and being deeper people.

The Victorian Mountaineers (1953) and Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959) are now classics in the genre of literature, mountaineering and spirituality. These are must reads and keepers for keeners on the nuanced relationship between Nature and the Soul, God and our all too human journey. It is significant to note that many of the American Beats (Snyder, Kerouac, Whalen, Jeffers, Everson) turned to the hills for hope and insight just as the English High Romantics (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Ruskin) saw in the peaks sites of wisdom and transformative power.

I have spent days, weeks and months in the last few decades in the high regions. In fact, in my early twenties, in the early 1970s, I lived in Switzerland twice and hiked and climbed many peaks to be near where Banner in the Sky and Heidi were written. I spent time in the Alpine village of Grindelwald in Switzerland in 1972 to be near the chalet of Coolidge, the Boswell of the Alps. I was fortunate to spend six months with Francis Schaeffer in 1973-74, and while I was at L’Abri, I took to the Alpine peaks often.

I have spent a great deal of time in the High Cascades and Coastal Mountains, and I find, in most of my hikes and climbs, most I meet, are interested in the connection between mountains and spirituality. Books in lookout cabins often deal with Eastern spirituality and mountains. Perhaps the time has come when we need to turn to the fullness of the Western Tradition and discern how Christianity, mountaineering and spirituality need to be brought together again. This is a peak worth climbing. May we do it, and do it well.

He didn’t draw lines, make borders or limits and urges us to do the same.

ThisJesus.

Let’s bring this Jesus to the world.

Because, when thisJesus comes into our world he returns us to ourselves.

He meets us at the well of our wandering and tells us who we are.

He bends down to write in the dust of our shame and he meets our eyes with grace.

ThisJesus stretches wide the margins of our hearts letting all be gathered in

as thisstory is birthed again and again.

Church, let’s deliver this Jesus to the world.

-----

Jessica Williams is a poet from Winnipeg, Canada and a grad student at St. Stephen's University in New Brunswick. She shares this poem to a class on "Pauline themes through the Eyes of the Early Church Fathers."

March 24, 2017

In recent Bible studies in Skagit County Jail and in our Tierra Nueva worshipping community I have been struck by Jesus’ unusual approach regarding substances, whether they be food, drink or drugs. In substance abuse and recovery circles (and vegan and other religious circles too) there is often intense scrutiny around what goes into the body—via stomach, lungs or veins. Jesus’ words to the crowd in Mark 7:14-16 are counter-cultural to twelve-step and religious communities.

“Listen to me, all of you, and understand!” Jesus insists, inviting his audience to pay particular attention to what follows-- Jesus’ underlined and bold-faced message. But will we understand?

“There is nothing outside the person which can defile him/her if it goes into her/him; but the things which proceed out of the person are what defile the person” (7:16), states Jesus, followed by an emphatic “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.

At this point I define “defile” as “to make unclean.” I add that back in Jesus’ time most religious leaders considered someone becoming unclean through the contagion of direct contact with the dead, lepers, the disabled, blood and through eating certain foods prohibited by the Old Testament law, like pork. Being unclean was seen as keeping people from God’s presence, and from religiously “clean” people or places.

March 23, 2017

Brad Jersakdelivers some half-baked thoughts about Philippians 2 and laying aside privilege into the St. Croix Vineyard oven. An aromatic community dialogue ensues about justice and self-giving love in our societies, churches and families.

* Dedicated to Azariah France-Williams, who inspired this message, and to Deanna Monks, who worked with me to clarify.

We planted St. Croix Vineyard in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, on October 4, 1992. We often felt an affinity to St. Francis as we tried to care for poorer folks around us and to be available to those in need, but it was almost a decade before we realized that we had planted the church on his feast day. That surprised us. As the years passed we continued to hope that our love of God would somehow help to bring a better quality of life to people in our area. We tried to build a vibrant and positive sense of community as an antidote to loneliness, and we dreamed that economic conditions would improve for our town and the people in it. Once we brought a child psychiatrist from England to teach about parenting and we offered her to local social workers for a day of training. They said, “Why would you, being a church, offer us something that we would actually like? And why would you do this for free?” It suddenly hit us that we had been offering the people in town things that we would like rather than things that would mean something to them. Our questions regarding meaningful mission began to change.

One dynamic area of childhood learning that needs to be discussed in detail is the way in which poverty can lower cognitive skills and interfere with learning ability; I would like to focus a bit on this dynamic.

There has been a tendency in some elements of society, notably right wing conservatives, to almost moralise poverty and the lower levels of cognitive and learning ability in people who grow up in poverty and suffering from malnutrition. While this is particularly true in America, such destructive attitudes exist elsewhere.

Poverty begets poverty. Low income families, those confined to minimum wage incomes and other forms of poverty, tend to remain at poverty levels for some generations. During the dark era of the Eugenics theory, it was posited that families that lived below or near the poverty level were mentally deficient due to some hereditary abnormality. The so-called "prosperity gospel" of some religious sects transferred this eugenics theory into a morality theory. The basic idea was that people lived in poverty because they merited God's disfavour. The theories are reflected in efforts by certain political wings striving to terminate school nutrition programmes that provide for what is often the only nutritious meal that poor children receive each day for the five days a week that they are in school. Even this does nothing to help create a successful learning environment for preschool children who live at or near the poverty level. In some nations, including in North America, this affects millions of children.

March 22, 2017

Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003).

O the mind, mind has mountains

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

From death in valleys preserve me, O Lord

Robert Macfarlane (p. 9)

Have men and women, throughout the long stretches of human history, taken to the mountains the way we do in our time and ethos? Have white crowned peaks, rock diadems and spear spires always drawn the curious, energetic, skilled and interested? Have mountains always been a place of allure, delight, charm and attraction? Or, is the passion for the mountains and out of doors hiking, climbing and glacier traverses more a product of the last few centuries? If this is the case, why is it? And, deeper yet, what are the reasons (complicated and diverse though they might be) that women and men take to the mountains, challenging rock rims and high perched peaks?

Mountains of the Mind attempts, in a variety of ways, to answer these questions. Such abiding questions, though, are not merely answered from the safe confines of the academic and library chair. Robert Macfarlane, to his credit, attempts to scale the peaks of such answers from a variety of routes. Macfarlane is Scottish, a climber and international in experience and interest. He has taken to many peaks, and his answers to the questions raised above emerge both from within himself and the multiple voices from those who have taken to the peaks in the past. Mountains of the Mind is as much about the internal ascents, hard places, difficult routes, worrisome crevasses, long trails, fears and insecurities that dog one and all as it is about the external and hard realities of real mountains and packed snow places.

March 19, 2017

I’ve never seen him -- you know? I have this Sunday-School picture that is stuck in my head but I’m sure it’s not what He looked like. And was He really born of a virgin? Was God a baby? Was he crucified? Is he coming back? This -- is our faith. Jesus, he did these things, he turned water to wine, he healed the sick and raised the dead. But -- none of us were there. I didn’t see it.

And, listen: This boat is made from the trees of my youth, my home. Which is both comforting and haunting all at once. My foundation is weathered wood and it holds my story, where I’ve been, this wood matters. There are many weak places beneath me and they make sense of this fear in my heart.

I’m in a small boat on a raging sea.

So, if Jesus were in this boat with me? The man, Jesus. I confess even then I am sure I would still freak out. Look at that sea! Jesus is just a man and we all know that some men abandon the ship. The waves are crashing here and it is obvious that I am at risk of dying any second so my question is this:

Does He not care that we are perishing?

Am I loved as I ask it?

Because, for some reason the only thing that has ever helped this doubt in me is saying it. I have to speak it out. I believe and I disbelieve so if you ask me to only believe I will not make it. But if you can listen to my fear, if I can hand it to you, I will find that inner place of rest. My own sleeping Jesus. And I will see that He in this boat with me will be enough.

But, I will only find my yes after all these no’s have been spoken making room in my lungs to breathe in hope. This doubt leads the way to faith. Slowly, pulls me close enough to understand that if Jesus didn’t care about this raging sea I’m in he wouldn’t be here with me. But he is. He is Emmanuel. He is God with us. And I will know it as I doubt it.

I’m in a small boat on a raging sea.

-Jessica Williams is a poet and Krista Heide is an artist, both from Winnipeg, Canada and are currently graduate students in theology at St. Stephen's University in New Brunswick.

March 15, 2017

With what has been transpiring on the US side of the border, it might be tempting to wag our Canadian fingers. Ron Dart, prodigious writer, mountaineer, poet, political science prof, and one of Canada’s leading intellectuals of the Red Tory tradition, admonishes otherwise. In his recent book, The North American High Tory Tradition, he demonstrates that the two apparently differing ideological camps have a single root. And we in Canada, wish as we might, are not as free of the offending subsequent effects as we may think.

In this text, Ron Dart has managed to accomplish quite an astounding thing: not merely reflect cogently – and with pique – on wide-ranging topics such as (but not limited to), Noam Chomsky, Platonic versus Aristotelian philosophy, contemplative mysticism, Allen Ginsburg, C.S. Lewis, the Beats, Anglicanism, Erasmus, Puritan theology, Charles Taylor, colonialization, and T.S Eliot, but even more impressively, has masterfully strung through all these topics and personalities a thread which, by the conclusion, brings home to the reader an undeniable fact: liberalism is a weed which must be dealt with if we as people – not just Canadians, or Americans or Westerners – are to flourish.

Sound like a rather large undertaking which Dart has attempted? It is; and, he has done it beautifully. Each of the above topics, along with still others, are handily dealt with in a way that aids to a great enlargement on a topic that isn’t much explored these days: the importance of what true conservatism looks like.

March 13, 2017

In the two Ancient Faith Radio podcasts below, Orthodox monk, Fr. Seraphim Aldea, of Mull Monastery in western Scotland offers a poignant and insightful—though intentionally unsatisfying—reflection on our unfortunate and anti-Christ reliance on violence in the face of violence. Speaking in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks, this reflection is raw and to-the-point, saying things without apology even though they can make us feel uncomfortable and evoke angry responses but that many of us nevertheless feel and know in our hearts. And in fact, the second of the two podcasts was produced in response to the hateful and violent comments that Fr. Seraphim endured after his initial podcast.

March 11, 2017

Editor: One of our readers sent in the following question. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I am happy to attempt a response.

Question: Some of this non-violent God stuff is relatively new to me, and just curious how it would relate to stories like the flood or Sodom and Gomorrah? Would this be explained in any of your books?Response: A good question and yes, we do 'go there' in A More Christlike God (in the section entitled "Unwrathing God") though not with the specific instance of Sodom and Gomorrah. Let's begin generally and work our way there.

If we start with the premise that God is only finally revealed exactly in Jesus (John 1:18, Hebrews 1:1-3), as perfect love seen most clearly on the cross (1 John 4:7-21), then everything else is filtered through that.

That Christ-centered theological filter requires us to reread stories like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in some cases, we can no longer receive the original telling as straightforward face-value propositions. Happily, we actually see both Jesus and Paul modeling this for us.

March 06, 2017

Truly the Holy Spirit has gathered us here today we may worship and praise our Lord Jesus Christ and remember the Gospel that He has given to us, and the freedom that He bestowed upon us. Why does the apostle in this epistle today tell us that Christ has torn down the middle wall that separated us and abolished the ordinances and the laws of commandments that were set before us, yet Christ said "I did not come to abolish the law that everything would be fulfilled" and that "not one jot or one tittle of the law would pass away until all things were fulfilled." The answer is that all things are fulfilled in our Lord Jesus Christ, that the fulfilment of the law is righteousness not punishment. Our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ has fulfilled all righteousness for us, on our behalf. He has also told us the actual meaning of the law and given us the very foundation stone the very hinge upon which the law and the prophets would rotate: love of God with all of our being and love of neighbour as our self. This is all the law and the prophets, and this is what the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ has given us: We have been liberated from the bondage of law and set free into the glorious freedom of divine grace, for we have been given grace in place of law.

Since Graham also has a habit of telling Christians who disagree with him that they’re not real Christians, it’s another reason he’s been drawing spikey local and international media attention for his March 3-5 crusade at Rogers Arena.

It is not the obligation of the Christian pastor or of the local church to foster love of country. While the Christian can be grateful for her nation (land, people, heritage) because there is always created goodness even in broken places and people, her loyalty is always first to the kingdom of heaven—to this world made a New Creation—and not to any temporal state.

Most Christians that have lived since Pentecost have lived under governments that conflict with their loyalties to Christ, and no state in history is a perfect reflection of God's rule.

When it comes to children, the church can encourage gratitude for the created goodness of one's people and respect for a nation's laws and institutions—when they are just and good—while instilling a primary loyalty to the New Creation.

Pledges and flags and patriotism are fine as far as they go and can be beautiful when they do not involve embracing tyranny or oppression or slavery or conquest but the Christian has deeper spiritual commitments and a higher materiality to which his heart and body are bound.

The church is not the location for instilling national pride but rather for the worship of the creative power that is revealed in the humility and powerlessness of Jesus Christ, the man who alone is God, and by which the worlds were framed. All things are held together by his divine charity. It is his nation to which the people of God belong as to a peculiar country.

This is why at the beginning of National Socialism in Germany Dietrich Bonhoeffer could pray that the state of Germany might die so that the nation of Germany might experience resurrection.

I sometimes now wonder if we have not gotten perilously close to the same circumstance in America, where the church has to have the courage to pray that our state might experience a kind of death in order that all its people, the land, and the best created goodness of its place in history—these things that Christians can rejoice in—might experience resurrection.

To the extent that the Christian has wedded himself to any form of government in the world he will have to die to his patriotic idea of the state in order to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

March 03, 2017

As I call Christians to the practices of radical forgiveness and nonviolent peacemaking that Jesus embodied and most clearly sets forth in the Sermon on the Mount, I often encounter Christians using Romans 13:1–7 as a kind of rebuttal. (Though whom they’re rebutting — me or Jesus — isn’t always clear.) Their argument goes something like this:

“God has ordained the government and has given it the sword to execute vengeance; therefore we cannot be opposed to war because Romans 13 sanctions ‘Just War.’”

Usually this argument is given to me in the context of advocating that the United States government should wage total war on ISIS and other enemies of America, and that the church should celebrate this.

But this is an egregious misinterpretation and misapplication of what Paul is talking about. Let me explain.First of all, are we really comfortable with using Paul to trump Jesus? That is what’s being done! Why is it that we are so prone to interpret Jesus in the light of a particular reading of Paul? (A reading of Paul that I — and many others — would argue is a conditioned misreading of Paul.) Why not take the Sermon on the Mount at face value and insist that any interpretation of Paul must line up with Jesus? Why not center our reading of Scripture with Jesus? I’m quite sure Paul would be entirely happy with this approach!